The Groom Will Keep His Name by Matt Ortile

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

I don’t remember exactly how this book got on my list, but it could have been recommended in any number of sources I utilize to discover newer books and authors. 

Matt Ortile is an editor at Catapult, and has written for a number of those online magazines that old guys like me occasionally read, but not like the young people. (Shakes cane.) More than that, he is also a gay Filipino immigrant, which means some intersection with my family history and present. 

 

(As I have noted in previous posts, my dad was born in the Philippines and grew up there. Like pretty much all of us, I also have LGBTQ friends and family, who I have chosen not to reject or antagonize. Instead, I am making a concerted effort to read queer voices and educate myself.) 

 

This book is sort of like a memoir, in that it recounts a lot of the author’s life from his childhood first in the Philippines and then in Las Vegas (of all places), his college education at Vassar, and his life in New York City after graduation.

 

It also has a good bit of his sex life, which can be uncomfortable, depending on your tolerance for sex in general. (If the gay part is what bothers you, then, well, you might just be a bigot…) For me, I think one of the parts that I found most uncomfortable was the chapter on cruising - I’m temperamentally inclined toward monogamy, and the idea of picking up random persons sounds like a form of hell. But humans vary a lot, and I certainly know gay folk who have been (practically) married for decades, and hetero folk who prefer to date around. But it’s not my vibe. 

 

The other thing that made me uncomfortable was the relationship dynamics - and that is something I find icky in heterosexual relationships too. Maybe it is my experience as a lawyer, but I keep seeing the red flags long before Matt does, and want to tell him to find someone more healthy to be with. Sigh. 

 

What this does mean, however, is that the book is interesting because Ortile wears his heart on his sleeve. And, as it proceeds, it is fascinating to see him recount how each relationship brought him closer to the understanding of the underlying racial dynamics that drove him to seek a certain kind of relationship: one with a wealthy, older, more “together” white guy. Because that would make him fit in - make him white by association, so to speak. Which, well, that’s not how it works. 

 

So, the best part of the book for me was this exploration of racial dynamics, particularly as they apply to someone like Ortile, the exotic sex object with certain “yellow fever” expectations. Not different at all from the same dynamic with certain white guys and their preference for Asian women - or perhaps their fantasy of Asian women. 

 

A lot of the book too is about the quest to become American, particularly in an age of renewed xenophobia and anti-LGBTQ bigotry. What does that even mean? And is assimilation a worthwhile goal? Should he seek to “become white”? 

 

I found myself drawn in to these conversations, and these questions that Ortile wrestles with. 

 

Oh, and I should perhaps mention the source of the title. Ortile followed the famous section of the New York Times with the society marriage announcements avidly. Often, there is a notation of “the bride will keep her name.” But never the opposite - even though one of Ortile’s friends submitted that very phrase. There is the assumption that of course the man keeps his name, while the woman will not necessarily do so. 

 

But what about when the couple is same sex? Well, for Ortile, his dream was always to marry a white man with a generic white name, and shed his “ethnic” one. Which nobody seems to pronounce correctly. 

 

He mentions this straight off in the book, but waits until near the end to actually reveal the correct pronunciation. Those of us who grew up in an area colonized by the Spanish back in the day (California) and remember that the Phillipines were also colonized (and named) by Spain, may have a leg up. It is “or-TEE-lay.” 

 

The writing is excellent, and very much contributes to the way the book draws you in, even if the world the author describes is unfamiliar. 

 

Ortile was, like me, an academically minded nerd - in both of our cases, it was in part an attempt to prove ourselves worthy. 

 

In all aspects of my life, I did what I could to prove my merit. Take off the tailored suit purchased on credit, and you get an insecure kid who grew up in two countries, was bullied for being different in both, felt less-than for simply being himself. 

 

As an immigrant, he endured the usual crap. Although it was particularly hilarious that he was called a “wetback” - white chauvinists are often laughably bad at keeping ethnicities straight. I guess all brown-skinned people look like Mexicans? Sigh. On the other hand, they got the “faggot” part right, as he notes. He knew from childhood that he was gay. 

 

I won’t duplicate all of the history here, but I will note that the Philippines marked the beginning of the US empire, and our global imperialism - we purchased the entire country from Spain for all of $20 million, and assumed we owned its occupants who were, after all, subhuman savages. It’s a sordid story, but one worth learning. I will also recommend both books by another Filipino-American author, Elaine Castillo, for more detail, and for the similar ambivalence about the role the United States has played on the world stage. 

 

Ortile certainly experienced prejudice for his skin color, his national origin, and his sexuality. His family was spat on and told to go back where they came from, and a teacher went so far as to suggest he read about Matthew Shepard. That’s…pretty awful, although I will say my own kids endured similar crap from certain teachers at their school, one of which was later fired for (and you would never guess) appallingly racist stuff said to black students. It’s as if those are all related. 

 

But to witness such prejudice, in my own time and in my history books, has taught me that racism, homophobia, and xenophobia are fixtures of life in the United States. 

 

The author’s initial approach to this situation was to lean in to the “model minority” myth. Which exists primarily as a weapon to use against African Americans. 

 

The model minority theory is a myth. It suggests that Asian Americans are the ideal foreigners: they are productive and respectable, proving that, in America, anyone can succeed, regardless of ethnicity or race, as long as you pull yourself up by your bootstraps. It is a popular fallacy that hangs is believability on the fact that Asian Americans have achieved significant levels of socioeconomic mobility in the United States: above-average household incomes, high rates of educational achievement, overrepresentation at the top forty universities and among US hnoriees of Nobel Prizes. 

This is related to contemporary stereotypes of Asians: the studious, diligent Asian; the upwardly mobile, law-abiding Asian; the inoffensive and unremarkable Asian. It positions Asian Americans as minorities of merit…

In the framework of the Boston Globe comic, it’s the “after” in the assimilationist makeover for Filipino, Korean, Japanese, and Chinese Americans. From being seen as lower-class and uneducated blue-collar workers, in the age of exclusionary acts and the so-called Yellow Peril, we became, by the latter half of the twentieth century, paradigms of middle-class mobility…

 

There is more, and it is quite spot-on about the fact that all of this is a creation of a white supremacist society - different groups are treated differently and pitted against each other. 

 

It was up to me to reframe the facets of my Filipinoness as nourishing things, to reclaim them from my internalized colonialism, this parasite that made a host of me. I fed it by eating up myths that upheld the status quo, myths I accepted as truths universally acknowledged about structural inequalities that seemed natural because I was mis-educated to think so. Colonialism is a structure built on lies, tricks its subjects into being the architects of their own oppression. 

 

The same is true of colonialism’s kissing cousin, Slaveholder Religion (aka white Evangelicalism). It is a structure built on lies, myths that support the status quo. 

 

That first chapter is titled after, and discusses, the Barong Tagalog, the traditional Filipino shirt. I mention that in part because it was a thing familiar to me as a child, and in fact, my late grandfather wore one for his third marriage. (There is a whole story there, and you can read a bit about it in this post.) 

 

Another chapter is somewhat about astrology. I was kind of surprised about this, but apparently astrology has made a huge comeback among younger millennials and Gen Z. Who knew? 

 

Ortile is a typical Millennial about it, though. He doesn’t take it that seriously, and more as a framework, a way of understanding personality traits. Which, I guess it is about as defensible as some of the other frameworks. I grew up with the Briggs-Myers one as the most reputable, and these days, it has been questioned. (FWIW, I straddle the line between INTJ and ISTJ, but I also don’t test out strongly to one side on any of the axes - and my feeling side has definitely had its chance to be acknowledged more as I have distanced myself from gender essentialism.)

 

The other frameworks that my birth family used were significantly less reputable, and more harmful. One was the thoroughly discredited “birth order” one. I think Kevin Leman is a basically decent guy, and was trying to help - and his ideas on discipline were far less abusive than those of James Dobson and Bill Gothard. But in our particular family structure, I had a LOT of supposed “first born” traits projected on me that were really just my parents’ trauma from their first-born parents. 

 

The other, the “spiritual gifts” one was so out there that it barely warrants mention, except that, again, it was used to project ideas on me that were not true about me, and as a weapon against my particular personality traits that make me who I am yet were rejected by my parents. 

 

So, by comparison to the weaponized religious psychobabble I endured, astrology seems almost quaint and harmless. I still think it is superstitious woo, but your mileage may vary, I guess. That said, Ortile’s take on it is actually rather fun at times. Ortile mentions Barthes throughout the book - and now I realize I really need to read him. This quote was particularly fun. 

 

Barthes compares astrology to literature: both are exercises in dealing with the real, seeking to know it by naming it - just as the Greeks called the moon Selene, as Keats called beauty truth. 

 

And then there are dating apps. I agree with Ortile’s assertion that matchmaking apps are even weirder and less explicable than astrology. So too is our bizarre obsession with monetization. 

 

Millennials like me have been told constantly to organize our daily lives in pursuit of maximum productivity. Time is capital, so preaches the Church of Optimization, and every year is the Year of the Hustle. We devote ourselves, then, to work and what it offers us: a salary, health insurance, proof of our life’s worth under late-stage capitalism. As investments, courtship and matters of the heart are too volatile. We turn to technology to reduce the risk and effort. In a way, this faith in tech requires grand optimism: Stop trying so hard, we tell ourselves, and be chill. Let love come to you. 

 

Perceptive stuff. I haven’t been on the dating market in over a quarter century, and I am glad I am not. But if I were, I seriously get what Ortile is saying here. And honestly, I apply a lot of this to potential friendships these days. 

 

When I meet someone new, I dive deep into their social media to probe for signs it won’t work. I pass on dudes who want kids, since I don’t; on guys who, judging by their pictures, only have white friends, since I’m not. I swipe left on men who say their political views are “conservative” or “moderate.” To possess an ideology that’s right of left evinces a heart that considered the lives of queer people, people of color, women, the poor, the disabled, immigrants and refugees, and combinations thereupon as lesser than one’s own. 

 

It’s sad to have to admit that, but these days it is true. (In no small part because particularly in the US, “left” means everything from center-right to center-left, while “right” means fascism and social darwinism, and “moderate” means “I don’t want people to think I’m a racist and sexist and bigot…but I really am.”) Sooner or later, it is inevitable that a “moderate” will come out with something about “the Hispanic problem” or “black people are just more prone to criminality” or “women are just too emotional to be leaders” or “transgender people aren’t real: they are just perverts preying on children.” Every time. 

 

The chapter on “Rice Queens and Dairy Queens” is excellent and fascinating. The terms, if you aren’t up on the lingo, refers to white gay guys who want to date the “exotic” Asian sorts, and white gay guys who only date white guys. See “yellow fever” above, or any number of nativist white guys. It’s all the same thing. 

 

What is intriguing about this chapter is that Ortile internalizes all of the cultural crap, from the underwear ads to the whiteness of “acceptable” masculinity in our culture. Since he mentions Marky Mark as an early crush, I figure I have to link to one of my favorite songs of that era, “Good Vibrations.” And yeah, hella homoerotic, but I’m here for Loleatta Holloway’s badass vocals and that banging piano solo. 

 

He talks a good bit about J. C. Leyendecker, one of the most influential ad men and artists of a certain era - and very gay. I may indeed be one of the few men in America who can casually drop that reference, and my wife knows exactly who I am talking about. She’s amazing that way. 

 

But these very white ideals became Ortile’s internalized script, and it negatively affected his love life. This passage is fascinating. 

 

I didn’t see myself as anything but a twink, at the ages of twenty and twenty-one, with only the nubile charms of a Filipino boy to leverage in uber-competitive New York. While some men took this bait, more common were those who disclaimed in their profiles, “no fats, no femmes, no Asians.” (Or, “no spice, no rice.”) Sometimes, men who wrote such slurs fucked me anyway, reminding me how racists might make exceptions in the name of conquest. 

 

On that last note, I am reminded of the certain sort of rapey douchebro who ostensibly wants only thin, white, conventionally attractive women, but who seems to fantasize about raping those outside the fantasy, including lesbian women. Exceptions in the name of conquest indeed. 

 

In a later chapter, which includes a passage contrasting Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, Miss Saigon, and David Henry Hwang’s later parody of the genre, Ortile returns to this troubling approach of white culture to Asian humans. 

 

In a 1988 afterword to his play, Hwang describes how it was easy to believe in the play he wrote because “the neo-Colonialst notion that good elements of a native society, like a good woman, desire submission to the masculine West speaks precisely to the heart of our foreign policy blunders in Asia and elsewhere.” 

As with the US in Vietnam, a white man thinks he can save the East and its people as he belittles them, as he ravishes his lotus blossom.

 

The thing is, there is a LOT of intersection of American history and Filipino history, but it tends to be forgotten, or even suppressed. 

 

Just one example the book brings up: at least here in California, we learn about Cesar Chavez. In Bakersfield, you might find Dolores Huerta dancing the cumbia at a local music event (and she enjoyed some tunes by our string quartet, and one of my kids has spoken with her about civil rights issues at a protest) - and that’s great! 

 

But even if you know about the Delano Grape Strike, do you know that it was led, not by Chavez, but by Larry Itliong, and consisted mostly of Filipino American laborers? 

 

It is a bit easier for those of us who live here, where mid-sized cities in California boast high numbers of Filipino residents - rivaling the big cities in the Philippines! For my wife, working in nursing, Filipino nurses are the backbone of our medical system everywhere in this state - and immigrants generally are vital for providing healthcare, even in white communities. 

 

But our official history books tend to ignore this. (Although to be fair, the state of California is working on improving our curriculum to include a more diverse (and thus far more accurate) account of the past.) 

 

I studied the history of Filipino America outside school, had to collect its disparate fragments and piece it together because the culture at large didn’t care to remember us. This forgetting is a predominant theme in the scope of Asian American histories. The Chinese Exclusion Act, Japanese American internment during World War II, US involvement in Vietnam and the following refugee crisis - my teenage textbooks made footnotes of these events, centered their chapters on America’s victories, its generals and politicians, and ignored whole lands and peoples used as props in the game of American imperialism. 

 

Something to remember when MAGA sorts talk about needing a “patriotic” curriculum rather than a “woke” one. What they really mean is a return to a whitewashing of history, one that erases the roles of people who are not white males. 

 

Another chapter which I really loved was “Balikbyan,” which is a Tagalog word referring to Filipinos who return to the Philippines after a stay in the US. This chapter is all about immigration, and the author’s work to get dual citizenship. (And thus two passports.)

 

Since Ortile’s mother naturalized him as a child, he had less in the way of hoops to jump through, but even getting paperwork as a naturalized citizen was stupidly complicated. (I can attest to this from the issues faced by friends and family. Our system is seemingly calculated to make it impossible for people who aren’t rich and educated to navigate.) 

 

This chapter also gets into his complicated relationships with his family. His parents separated when he was young, and his parents took very different approaches to him. His mother always knew he was gay, and supported him. (And his stepfather did likewise later.) His father kept trying for years to “fix” him, although he later came around enough that they have a relationship. 

 

These summer trips were dutiful attempts to maintain good relations with a man around whom I wasn’t sure how to act. In other words, we were your typical dad and gay teenage son. Though my father has always loved me - I know that - our relationship was strained after years of comments like “stand up straight like a man.” His demands that I “man up” echoed the bullying I faced at my all-boys school in Manila, from classmates who told me I was going to hell for being a “sissy,” a “bakla,” a “girl.” As a young gay boy, I counted my father among my tormentors, people who would rather I weren’t myself. 

 

His mother was a huge contrast, and I am a bit jealous that he had a parent who actually seemed to understand him, at least most of the time. 

 

She and I were your typical mom and gay teenage son. Both new immigrants in the States, with my stepfather still living in Manila, we only had each other. She was my best friend, the first person I told I was gay, at thirteen. I sought her counsel in the face of adversity, as I faced new teenage tormentors, patronizing teachers, and homophobic priests. Confused and hurt at how efficiently people in America could hate, I was still that three-year-old boy at his uncle's wedding, running to his mother whenever he felt uncomfortable and hurt. I felt safe coming out to her, felt safe coming to her for everything, knowing she would do all she could to protect and care for me. 

 

And yes, it is appalling how incredibly efficient Americans are at hating. It is part of our national character, unfortunately. 

 

There is another passage about his mother, that I think is so badass. 

 

We were at Sunday mass in Las Vegas, in the summer of 2008, when a priest gave a homophobic homily, speaking against the legalization of same-sex marriages in nearby California. It was the same familiar message, condemning homosexuality as a sin and sentencing such sinners to hell. My ears grew hot. My mother walked out of the church with me in the middle of the service. She assured me that she loved me and all facets of my identity, told me that God did too, that He loved all His creations. I appreciated her support, always have. Still, the hateful priest underscored the fact that, as a gay man, I would face hate on all sides of the Pacific.

 

I had a similar experience of a viciously anti-gay sermon, and I wish I had had the courage to walk away then and there. As it was, it took another year and a half before we left organized religion, but the roots of it were there.

 

 I did speak up a few months later when our former pastor made the bullshit assertion that “christians ended slavery,” glossing the fact that they fucking CREATED chattel slavery in the US in the first place, and that the theological ancestors of our tradition were thoroughly pro-enslavement. 

 

And also, that sermon was the end of my last vestige of homophobia - I realized it was all rooted in bigotry, not in Christ’s teachings and example. When we finally left organized religion in the wake of the Trump and MAGA takeover of Evangelicalism, I did have a conversation with our kids, where I stated outright that I did not believe God made mistakes, and that gay and transgender people were part of His intentional and lovingly envisioned creation. I still firmly believe that. 

 

Later in the chapter, he offers some incredible hope about his father, though, which I thought was touching. His father actually learns how to listen. 

 

What the fucking hell? Someone actually changes for the better? 

 

Yeah, sorry, I am pretty bitter and pissed that my own parents have consistently refused to listen to me for the last, like, 35 years.  I’m jealous of Ortile. But also encouraged that at least some people are capable of positive change. Anyway, he listens, they talk, and he offers this surprisingly good bit of advice:

 

“Sometimes, the roles people play in your life…They change. You learn to let them go.”

 

Ortile thinks about it, then realizes that things have shifted between them. 

 

I wasn’t sure what had changed, encouraged by my candor. Maybe it was that I began to let go of the memory of my father who didn’t understand me, welcoming into my life my father who was willing to try.

 

Seriously, that made me cry. I so very much wish that day will someday come for me. Even though I realize it never will. My parents were fully willing to throw me away rather than listen, let alone change. This is my life, and I have no control of that part of it. 

 

Instead, I have had to make peace with something that the author notes is the norm for LGBTQ people: we embrace our chosen family. Those who accept us for who we are, and who love us rather than try to change us. I am so incredibly grateful for my chosen family - you know who you are. And I include some amazing people who stepped in to be the grandparents to my children my parents refused to be. 

 

Chosen family is defined by care and mutual support, the kind of compassion and grand acts and little gestures that nourish us as individuals, whether together or alone. 

 

The final chapter, the one that gives the book its name, is another favorite. I am happily married (23+ years!) to an amazing woman. We have an egalitarian relationship. But I also confess that both of us have some significant discomfort with the institution itself, which is explicitly rooted in some really misogynistic beliefs. The author sums it up pretty well. 

 

I should not want to get married. I should not buy into the wedding industries’ ritualization of capitalism. I should not long for a legal status rooted in the patriarchal subjugation and ownership of women. I should not wish to go through this rite of passage that promises a vision of idealized love, nor seek validation from cultural and social authorities by participating in said rite, a legal right that such authorities have denied queer people. I should not support a marriage equality movement that has historically excluded trans and queer people of color, that trades on heteronormative respectability politics and hinges my worth as a queer person on how closely I resemble the straight majority. I should not at all aspire to a wedding so fabulous, a marriage so conventional, nor a love so Instagrammable.

Nevertheless, I do.

 

Yeah, I concur with literally everything in that statement except the part about being queer. I am boringly cishet, and secretly like the whole pomp and circumstance, even as I hate the root meaning of so much of it. If I were to do it again, I would obviously want to marry my wife, but I would probably elope next time - and definitely tell my parents and sister that they could either shut up, or go fuck themselves if they couldn’t keep their big mouths shut about our lives. 

 

Ortile envisioned for much of his life, a lavish wedding, and the chance to shed his “ethnic” last name and become a white American. But as he grew and matured, he realized that all of this was an attempt at gaining approval from a system which creates brutal hierarchies rather than equality. I think this passage is incredible. 

 

It’s no wonder I so easily bought into this sort of attitude, this heteronormativity. It closely resembles the Asian model minority myth, which proposes the idealized image of boot-strapping Asian Americans who aspire to whiteness and are thus deemed unthreatening by white Americans. Within these two frameworks, both animated by a deference to the dominant group, those who prioritize assimilation are rewarded, deemed worthier than other minorities of rights and privileges, thereby inhibiting solidarity with those who don’t follow the same path. 

 

And that’s the thing. Even as I am a white guy, married to a white woman, with white kids, I find white supremacy to be damaging and corrosive to everyone, myself included. And as a cishet married guy, I find heteronormativity - aka gender essentialism and hierarchy - to be damaging and corrosive to everyone. Both need to be destroyed and replaced with a true equality, one envisioned in Galatians: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” 

 

Ultimately, our relation to each other should not be founded on a hierarchy of whiteness, of heteronormativity, of wealth, or any other human-created distinction, but on our common humanity. 

 

That, ultimately, is the strength of this book. It always takes the marginalized to see these truths - which is one reason I seek out books written by those outside the usual rings of power and privilege. Ortile brings these ideas to life as part of his own life. Don’t let the sex get in the way of seeing the bigger picture. 

 

I will end with something a bit lighter. There is a passage where Ortile visits the Philippines, and mentions Jollibee and Chicken Joy. There was a huge stir when this chain came to Bakersfield. And now we have a Max’s too. This is like McDonalds coming behind the Iron Curtain-level stuff. I still haven’t gotten to Max’s yet, but for my money, it is worth the drive to Best Lumpia in Stockton…if you know, you know. 

Elf Dog and Owl Head by M. T. Anderson

Source of book: Audiobook from the library

 

This book recently was named a Newbery Honor Book, so it kind of fit with our unofficial, and haphazard exploration of Newbery books over the last decade plus. Also, I thought it might be interesting because it was by M. T. Anderson, the author of The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, and I thought that was a fascinating book. 

Elf Dog and Owl Head is nothing like Octavian Nothing. At all. Rather than historical fiction set before the American Revolution, it is kind of on the border of fantasy and magical realism, and very much of our time. 

 

A family is largely isolated at home due to a “sickness” that sounds an awful lot like Covid-19. The kids have to do school on their computer, they can’t see their friends, mom loses her job, and dad only keeps his because it isn’t around people and it is essential. The family finds itself bickering and edgy and frustrated and, well, exactly how Covid was experienced by many of us. 

 

Into this situation comes an Elf Dog, Elphinore, who is part of a hunting of a Wyrm in the underworld when the hunt breaks out into the human world. She is left behind, and finds her way to Clay, the middle child (and only boy) in the family. 

 

So, let’s see: we have a vicious Wyrm on the loose, an Elf Dog who has taken shelter with a human, and kids with nothing but time on their hands…sounds like a solid story setup. 

 

At first, Clay just follows the dog around, and discovers that she can travel - and take him - over the borders of the worlds that exist within the adjacent forest. 

 

He finds a village of Owl Heads - humanoid creatures with owl heads who are old-fashioned - I would say most likely modeled on the Quakers. A close-knit community, where decisions are made by committee, gender equality, and they call each other “brother” and “sister.” 

 

And, from what the story tells us, it appears that they are non-violent, particularly compared to some of the other denizens - such as the Elf-creatures who live under the mountain. The ones Elphinore was with when she got separated. 

 

It should go without saying that crossing over worlds like this will eventually lead to trouble, and it definitely does. The problem is that children - of all species - are not good at observing boundaries. Elphinore is young and curious, and starts everything in motion. But there is also Clay. And his sisters DiRossi and Juniper. And the owl boy Amos. They just refuse to sequester themselves…

 

The book, therefore, has multiple layers. There is the very normal human drama of a family in lockdown, which I thought was well written - the frustration is real, but we can tell the siblings don’t truly hate each other, no matter what stupid stuff they say under stress. 

 

The other part, of course, is an imaginative world beyond our own, with fun characters, including a cynical giant who seems to be the only person who understands DiRossi…although as she finds out, cynicism is no basis for an actual friendship. This is a world that literally could have been explored in a book ten times as long, and Anderson’s imagination likely would not have run out. One wonders if he will write a sequel, or another book in that world. It was fun, but all too brief. 

 

While the book wasn’t at the level of Octavian Nothing, it is a worthwhile kids book, and will likely resonate for people of all ages who remember the height of the pandemic and lockdown, and wished we had an escape. 

 

***

 

Side note: Like Clay, my approach to the lockdown was to get out and hike wherever I could - forest, desert, foothills, mountains. The kids and I spent many days in the middle of nowhere, often meeting no one on the trail. That’s one advantage of being knowledgeable about the backcountry and able to read a map. If I am around to see the next pandemic, and you need help finding a trail with the appropriate social distancing, hit me up. I might be able to find one for you…

 

All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

This book was our selection this month for the Literary Lush Book Club. Unfortunately, Covid messed up our meeting plans, so we haven’t discussed it yet. In any case, as is our usual tradition for November, we read the “One Book One Bakersfield” selection. 

All You Can Ever Know is a deeply personal and emotionally raw account. The author was adopted as an infant. Her biological parents were Korean immigrants, and, as she discovered later, there were a lot of factors that went into her being placed for adoption. 

 

Her adoptive parents were white, and raised her in an overwhelmingly white town in central Oregon. As was common back in that time, they had no knowledge or resources on how to raise a non-white child in that situation, so she grew up facing constant racism and unable to talk with her parents about it. 

 

Later in life, after she married and was pregnant with her first child, she decided to find her birth parents. And her older sisters who had no idea she existed. (They were told the baby had died.) 

 

This book is all about the author’s life, and her complicated relationship with her family - all of it. 

 

I was surprised just how much this book emotionally affected me. My situation is very different, and yet, the complexities of family, of rejection, of abuse, and of the emotional ties to our parents that are complicated, are common to our stories in enough ways. 

 

The other thing that this book makes clear is that adoption is not the panacea that the anti-abortion lobby makes it out to be. While an adoption may be an unmitigated good for the parents, this isn’t the case for the child. At the heart of any adoption is a loss, a tragedy, a separation.  This doesn’t mean that adoption itself is bad - far from it in many situations. But it isn’t a simple happy ending, and it isn’t the solution that should be our first choice in every situation. 

 

I want to make clear that I do not mean to denigrate any of the adoptive parents I know (or the ones I don’t.) Most adoptive parents do so from good motives, do the best they know for their children, and are usually good people. I’m sure there are exceptions, but for the most part, the problem isn’t bad intent. 

 

The problem is that in many cases, a child is separated from parents not because those parents are dead or bad people, but because of poverty and the problems that come with poverty. 

 

By the way, I have some experience in this. For the past 22 years, I have represented Indian Tribes in Juvenile Dependency cases pursuant to the Indian Child Welfare Act. This means that I have seen up close which children are removed from homes, what those homes are like, and who the children end up with when adopted. 

 

I can say straight up that there are very few white middle-class children who are adopted out. For the most part, the people in the system are poor. Full stop. Poor. 

 

Yes, of course, drugs and alcohol are factors - but middle-class people have addictions without losing their children. And yes, there are abusive parents - but middle-class abusers usually get to keep their kids. It is poverty that makes the difference. 

 

So, in this book, you have a fairly poor immigrant family. The mother is mentally ill, but has no access to treatment. She gets pregnant, and finds to her dismay that the child is another girl. When she gives birth prematurely, the doctors tell the parents that the child will be profoundly disabled and need lifetime care - care that the parents cannot possibly afford. The father is worried already because the mother is abusive to her younger daughter, and he is concerned that the baby will be abused even more. 

 

And so, the decision to place the child for adoption is made. 

 

It is a decision that neither of the parents truly wants, but one they feel they have to make. In a better world, one where medical and mental health care was available, in a world where income was not so precarious, or even in a world where someone was willing to give some reassurance and encouragement, Nicole would not have been adopted out. 

 

There is an interesting line in the book on that note. 

 

Today, when I’m asked, I often say that I no longer consider adoption - individual adoptions, or adoption as a practice - in terms of right and wrong. I urge people to go into it with their eyes open, recognizing how complex it truly is; I encourage adopted people to tell their stories, our stories, and let no one else define these experiences for us. 

 

Later in the book, she discusses the wide range of opinions her fellow adoptees have expressed, from “closed adoptions like ours are little better than child trafficking” to “I never think about my birth family at all.” It is complicated, to put it mildly.

 

I should explain here as well that Nicole had and has a good relationship with her adoptive parents - the ones she considers her “real” parents. They are portrayed very positively in the book, as any errors they made were out of ignorance rather than malevolence, and they take Nicole’s quest for her birth family with incredible grace and encouragement. She is correct in her conclusion that her life was in most ways better because of the adoption. 

 

Her birth father also is portrayed in an empathetic manner. He is a flawed man, but he tries, and as a result, ends up being in Nicole’s life - and indeed, part of her extended family. 

 

Her birth mother, on the other hand, is more problematic. The middle sister was brutally abused by her, and in fact when her parents divorced, she insisted on living with her father. Because Nicole knew about the abuse, and bonded with her sister, she wasn’t really able to build a relationship with her birth mother, who never really took responsibility for that. It is sad, but entirely understandable. 

 

The book, like the relationships, is complicated. It doesn’t shy away from the tough stuff, and Nicole is strikingly open about her messy feelings. 

 

There are a few lines that I wanted to highlight that stood out to me. 

 

Family lore given to us as children has such hold over us, such staying power. In can form the bedrock of another kind of faith, one to rival any religion, informing our beliefs about ourselves, and our families, and our place in the world. When tiny, traitorous doubts arose, when I felt lost or alone or confused about all the things I couldn’t know, I told myself that something as noble as my birth parents’ sacrifice demanded my trust. My loyalty. 

 

Man, the family lore in my own family was really strong, and I tried so hard to believe it for so many years. We were different - in a good way. We were accepting and welcoming. We were the nice people. It really wasn’t until it was made clear that my wife was not accepted and would never be accepted that I was able to see that the narrative was straight-up bullshit. A myth to make my parents feel better about themselves, lies to make them comfortable. 

 

All members of a family have their own ways of defining the others. All parents have ways of saying things about their children as if they are indisputable facts, even when the children don’t believe them to be true at all. It’s why so many of us feel alone or unseen, despite the real love we have for our families and they for us. 

 

This was a big part of it. With the “inspiration” from religious charlatans - those authoritarian parenting gurus my parents followed - I was typecast as the rebellious child, the one who needed most to be “fixed,” the one who was in for a rude awakening when I tried to make it in the real world. (And in particular, when I discovered that no woman would want me until I learned to be fully responsible for their emotions.) 

 

And yes, starting in my early teens, I felt alone and unseen by my parents. I still do not fully grasp how they completely failed to understand who I was - a child who was not in fact rebellious, but who had too much integrity to simply comply when I felt things were unfair. 

 

There is another fascinating line in the book, one uttered by Nicole’s adoptive mother when she was a kid. 

 

We weren’t really prepared to have a kid like you, my mother had said once, something she might have regretted if she were in the habit of questioning her words.

 

As Nicole notes, she was a loved member of the family…but still an outsider. I feel this one so much. I’m not even going to try to list all of the similar things I have heard from my parents over the years, but it is very much clear that they were not prepared at all for a child like me. I was not the kind of child they wanted - sickly, needy, emotional, skeptical, a voracious learner. (My sister was the kind of kid they wanted, and that much continues to be made very clear to me.) 

 

I know that none of us parents are prepared for our kids, and we all have to improvise as we go. I am sure I have made many, many mistakes with my kids. I am determined, however, to accept them for who they are, and not consider them defective because they aren’t what I expected. 

 

As a parent herself by the time she wrote this book, she also has plenty of empathy for parents, whether adoptive or otherwise. This line resonated with me regarding the experience of being a parent. 

 

No matter how a child joins your family, their presence changes all the rules; they move into your heart and build new rooms, knock down walls you never knew existed. This is why new parents crave reassurance more than anything else: We tell ourselves, and want others to tell us, that we’re going to be wonderful parents. That our children will be happy. That their suffering will be light - or at least, never of a kind we cannot help them through. We have to believe these things, promise ourselves we’ll meet every challenge, or we’d never be brave enough to begin. 

 

Man, that is so true. I often wonder if I had known the future, if I would have chosen to have kids. And this is no reflection on my kids, who are great people, or on the experience of being a parent, which I have greatly enjoyed. But without that foolish optimism, would I have done it? 

 

Another passage that was fascinating was Nicole’s description of her own emotional wrestling with the fact of her adoption. In a way, her birth parents abandoned her, and there is trauma from that, even if Nicole’s life was indeed better in her adoptive family. 

 

Back then, the mystery I wondered about more than anything else was why my first parents had given me up. I knew the practical reasons: money, my health - but I did wonder if there were other reasons, too; if something about me had simply failed to move them, command their love or loyalty. 

 

All of us who have been abandoned or rejected by our parents have wondered this. For me, I continue to wonder what it was about me that never really commanded my parents’ love or loyalty. Why it was that when I expressed hurt (at least of that hurt came from my mother or sister), my feelings were dismissed. Why it was that it was okay to hurt my wife, and when I expressed my feelings about that, everything shut down and was never spoken of again. Why does my sister receive their unconditional love and loyalty, but I do not? I guess I wasn’t the child they were prepared for or wanted. 

 

There is another passage that relates to this. Nicole’s anxiety as a parent often is related to her fear that she will be like her birth mother. 

 

Sitting there on my sofa talking to my mother, hugely pregnant and fighting tears, I couldn’t yet understand that my birth mother’s nature would become the invisible thread connecting all my anxieties, my many shortcomings, all my worst moments as a parent. That it would cause me to question my instincts, bring me up short every time I lost my temper with one of my children. Years later, I would think of her when I stopped, mid-argument, to give my tearful daughter permission to challenge me if she ever thought I was being unfair: You can always tell me. You can say, I think you’re being too hard on me right now, and I’ll stop and listen to you. 

 

This is one area I know I fail in, and I do so the same way my parents did. I am trying to be better about listening, but the patterns run deep. This is one area I do want to break the family cycle, because this was - and indeed is - the core problem with my parents: as the authoritarian parenting gurus taught them, a child is to comply first, and only discuss afterwards, and the parent is free to dismiss the complaint. A child should never challenge a parent or that parent’s fairness. Ever. I want my children to be able to do this, which is one reason why my wife and I have chosen not to focus on “talking back” as a bad thing, the way my parents did - and continue to do. 

 

Nicole’s sister Cindy’s story comes into the book as well. Her being left behind with the grandparents in Korea when her parents immigrated, for example. And then, when she reunited, not remembering her mother much, was shocked and horrified to find her angry and abusive. Worse, she, like other abused children, thought that this was just normal - all parents are like this. 

 

Gradually, Cindy realized that the way her mother treated her was not normal. She began to wish for a different life because hers made no sense to her. And even though our reasons were so different and she’d had the worst of it by far, this reminded me so poignantly of how I used to feel too. 

 

Me too. I think it was around puberty that it first started to dawn on me that my mother was not okay, that she was not normal. That she was in a real sense, suffering from untreated mental illness likely due to her childhood trauma. 

 

Later, when we joined Gothard’s cult, despite my best attempts to go along and believe my parents (I told you I was not rebellious), I increasingly wanted a different life, because the one I had was indeed making no sense. I naively believed that when I moved out, married, and had kids, that I would be able to do that and still maintain a relationship with my parents. It didn’t work out that way, unfortunately. 

 

On a much lighter note, I have to mention her account of the birth of her first child. When she went into labor, she didn’t wake her husband up, with the idea that at least one of them should go into the process well rested. My wife definitely fits that approach. She looked great after each delivery, and I looked like hell. She literally sent me home to sleep - after I fetched her some In-n-Out for her postpartum meal. 

 

I’ll end with this passage from the end, which also resonates with me - with Trump’s first election, I decided that I would no longer let racism pass without comment, even if it was family saying crap. 

 

Though I’ve sometimes grieved for absent solidarity, now that I am raising children of color in a starkly divided America I feel, even more strongly, that maintaining my silence with my relatives - pretending my race does not matter - is no longer a choice I can make. It feels like my duty as my white family’s de facto Asian ambassador to remind them that I am not white, that we do experience this country in different ways because of it, that many people still know oppression far more insidious and harmful than anything I’ve ever faced. Every time I do this, I am breaching the sacred pact of our family, our once-shared belief that my race is irrelevant in the presence of their love. 

 

Ultimately, this was the issue that led to my parents cutting off contact. (According to them, at least. I think there were other unspoken reasons: my decision to go no-contact with my sister, a child coming out as transgender, their beliefs about the Covid vaccine, and so on…) In the final analysis, their comfort in their beliefs about race mattered more to them than I did. And perhaps, it really was that I was not the kind of child they wanted. 

 

I know this got personal quite a bit, and I don’t want that to detract from the book at all. The book is excellent, and everyone should read it, particularly if they were adopted, have adopted, or know someone who was adopted. I was unprepared for how much emotion this book would touch in me, which is why I ended up talking about my own fraught relationship.

 

However a child came to be abandoned or rejected, those complicated emotions are a universal human experience, and this book spoke to me in that way as a result. 

 

I am glad Nicole Chung chose to speak out about her experience. Too often adoption has been seen in terms of good or bad and not often enough as a complex and diverse experience. Chung’s nuanced and empathetic account of her life reveals many layers of that complexity, and gives all of us insight into the lives of others we share this world with. 

 

Denial: The Unspeakable Truth by Keith Kahn-Harris

Source of book: I own this

 

Well, this is definitely the most depressing book I have read this year, and that is in the face of some significant competition. Unfortunately, it is also far too accurate and explains much of what we have experienced during the Trump Era. 

 

The core idea is this: Denialism is different than denial - all of us are in denial to some benign extent as a cost of living in society (just like lying is a necessary social skill to exist in human society.) Denialism is an entire system of creating justification for believing lies, supported by pseudoscience, and taking on a life of its own. Denialism is a way to keep our darkest desires - the ones it is socially unacceptable to speak openly - hidden. And to legitimate those dark desires.

Kahn-Harris examines a few of these and mentions others. He chooses Holocaust denialism as an obvious one - he is Jewish after all. He also looks at climate change denialism as another. 

 

There are others mentioned, and I am all too familiar with some of them. For example, Young Earth Creationism, which has developed an entire industry to lend plausibility to its beliefs. And the “vaccines cause autism” one. And a number of others. 

 

Some of these are relatively benign, while others - the foundation of the MAGA movement, threaten to destroy democracy and plunge us into another dark ages. 

 

The reason this book is so dark to me is that it can’t really offer solutions except on the margins. A few of us have indeed had a “moral epiphany” and others have walked away once the core darkness of the soul is exposed. But for many - perhaps most - people, what we experience is the unpleasant realization that we and they do not share the same moral values. As the author puts it, “moral diversity.” 

 

This is the most devastating thing that Trump has revealed - he is a symptom, not the cause of our deep soul-sickness as humans, and as Americans. Many of us truly want to see others suffer and die, even if we hurt ourselves in the process. 

 

The book also hit close to home because my parents are increasingly steeped in denialism, to the incredible damage of their relationships with me and my family, and others within my birth family. 

 

In the introduction, the author mentions his childhood flirtation with conspiracy theories - this was pre-internet, so we weren’t as openly awash in denialism as we are now. He even considered forming a Jewish metal band that pretended to espouse Holocaust denial. (Ha ha we’re so funny, amirite?) 

 

Today, it’s harder for me to see the fun in all this. The breezy insouciance with which I consumed ‘alternative’ scholarship was based on the assumption that none of it really mattered. In my cynical, self-absorbed late teens and twenties during the smug 1990s there was no reason to think that neo-Nazis were anything other than marginal idiots; alternate histories and conspiracy theories similarly appeared to pose no threat to anyone. 

 

I should have looked harder. It wasn’t just neo-Nazis and fringe cranks who were constructing alternative scholarship; big business and conservative politics were doing it too. 

 

The first chapter lays the foundation quite well, and had some lines that have really caused me to think more deeply. For example, he does a deep dive on desire and why it is so complicated for humans. 

 

Human life also requires that we suppress open expressions of desire. The range of circumstances in which this suppression is necessary may be greater than for other forms of life - hiding signs of sexual arousal, hiding envy, hiding dislike - but the principle remains the same: if we desire things, we may have to dissemble in order to gratify that desire or simply in order to be able to continue living alongside others. 

 

Denial is just one form of the lying we need to do in order to function in society - we lie to ourselves about our desires. This is often benign, but it can cross the line into destructive. He also explains the difference between benign denial and denialism.

 

Denialism is more than just another manifestation of humdrum deceptions and self-deceptions. It represents the transformation of the everyday practice of denial into a new way of seeing the world and - most importantly to this book - a collective accomplishment. Denial is furtive and routine; denialism is combative and extraordinary. Denial hides from the truth; denialism builds a new and better truth. 

 

He then mentions some of the denialisms that the book will examine. 

 

In recent years, the term denialism has come to be applied to a strange field of ‘scholarship.’ The scholars in this field engage in an audacious project: to hold back, against seemingly insurmountable odds, the findings of an avalanche of research. They argue that the Holocaust (and other genocides) never happened, that anthropogenic (caused by humans) climate change is a myth, that AIDS either does not exist or is unrelated to HIV, that evolution is a scientific impossibility, and that all manner of other scientific and historical orthodoxies must be rejected. 

 

With the exception of Holocaust denial, every single one of those other denialisms either are or have been believed by my parents. (At least I think they no longer believe in AIDS denialism, but I’m not 100% sure…) And, unfortunately, many others. Covid vaccines will kill you eventually and actually spread the disease. LGBTQ people are living in sin and/or are caused by bad parenting. Trickle Down Economics works. And on and on it goes. 

 

Denialism is not stupidity, ignorance, mendacity, or psychological pathology. Nor is it the same as lying. Of course, denialists can be stupid, ignorant liars, but so can we all. 

 

The author then looks at what is behind these denialisms. 

 

Nor is denialism simply a desperate attempt to avoid facing an incontrovertible moral truth. I do not believe that, if only I could find the key to ‘make them understand,’ denialsists would think just like me. A global warming denialist is not an environmentalist who cannot accept s/he is really an environmentalist, a Holocaust denier is not someone who cannot face the inescapable obligation to commemorate the Holocaust, an AIDS denialist is not an AIDS activist who won’t acknowledge the necessity for Western medicine in combatting the disease, and so on. If denialists were to stop denying, we cannot assume that we would then have a shared moral foundation on which we could make progress as a species.

 

Denialism is not a barrier to acknowledging a common moral foundation, it as a barrier to acknowledging moral differences. 

 

And therein lies the horror. As I have come to realize, many of my fellow Americans (and most of my former Evangelical tribe) do not share my morality. At all. And that includes my parents, unfortunately. We have profound moral differences that cannot and thus will not be resolved. 

 

The author does make a good point that it is important to understand that humans all have some vulnerability to this - none of us are as moral as we want to think we are, and he can understand the “why” of denialism to a degree. 

 

Even if I may have difficulty in putting myself in the position of people who believe profoundly different things to me, I can certainly empathize with the predicament that denialists find themselves in. Denialism arises from being in an impossible bind: holding to desires, values, ideologies and morals that cannot be openly spoken of. 

 

Kahn-Harris also quotes Michael Specter (a debunker of denialism) with an interesting insight that really explains both MAGA and my parents well:

 

“We have all been in denial at some point in our lives; faced with truths too painful to accept, rejection often seems the only way to cope. Under those circumstances, facts, no matter how detailed or irrefutable, rarely make a difference. Denialism is denial writ large - when an entire segment of society, often struggling with the trauma of change, turns away from reality in favor of a more comfortable life.”

 

And the author expands on that idea a bit:

 

Denialism can usually be traced back to a kind of founding trauma, a shocking explosion of knowledge that directly threatens something fundamental to oneself or to a group of which one is a part. 

 

As a result of this knowledge, it is necessary to make a choice.  

 

In these moments, the future opens up into a number of possible paths. The main path leads where it should lead, where it has to lead to remain a decent person: towards accepting the conclusions that the evidence demands. Yet taking this path might mean sabotaging one’s economic interests, repudiating one’s life’s work, or struggling to reconcile one’s deepest beliefs with irrefutable contrary evidence. 

 

Oh yes, all three of those apply to my parents in different ways. Definitely financial interest (and that applies to us all, probably), my mom’s sense of identity as a stay-at-home mom, and the fundamentalist religious beliefs that are threatened by any evidence against them. With LGBTQ grandchildren, this particularly requires a pernicious form of denialism. As the author points out:

 

In any case, all denialists share a burning desire to continue to appear decent while rejecting the path of decency. It is motivated by a yearning to carry on as one is, without conceding that one was ever on the wrong path. 

 

Unfortunately, denialism is pretty much impervious to any refutation. It just grows stronger the more you fight it. Which is an unsolvable dilemma for those of us living in reality. 

 

To a degree then, denialism always wins. To present itself as a viable option, denialism can adopt scholarly or polemical styles according to what will work best with a target audience. Those who attempt to counter denialism can lose when they position themselves as scholarly experts and lose when they present themselves as clear communicators. 

 

I guess on the plus side is that for people who are committed to thinking and a healthy skepticism (my wife and I have noted that we both have active bullshit detectors, something our parents seem to have mostly lacked, which is why they fell hard for religious batshittery) is that it really isn’t that difficult to identify denialism. 

 

You can make a good or bad argument to demonstrate anthropogenic global warming, the historical reality of the Holocaust, or the reality of evolution; denialists can only make bad arguments against them. In this respect, denialism is defined by absence as much as presence. This is another reason why it is wise to judge arguments by their best proponents. If you search for the best argument for a position and find only denialist techniques, then you are looking at denialism. 

 

This turned out to be true for me. I have rejected a lot of denialist ideas that I was taught, both at home and at church - and in my former political affiliation that I was raised in - because I made the “mistake” of actually reading their best arguments. I came to believe in evolution in significant part because I started actually reading the “best” arguments for creationism and realized they were both bad and dishonest. Ditto for “alternative medicine,” trickle-down economics, anti-LGBTQ bigotry, and more. 

 

A later chapter talks about the gap - the gap between our desires and what we feel free to say about them. Unsurprisingly, the chapter opens with a quotation from the Hebrew scriptures commanding genocide. 

 

And this really is the reality that Trump has unveiled. In the past, humans proudly celebrated the commission of genocide. Openly. But culture has changed. At least somewhat. 

 

Earlier despots had a language through which their bloodthirsty deeds could be proclaimed. They had much else too: systems of belief that legitimized and even sacralized the looting of wealth from their own and others’ lands, the rampant inequalities that resulted from it, and systems of government, knowledge and social order based on faith rather than evidence. 

 

And now? Now what could once be spoken of, even celebrated, is officially denied. It’s not just genocide: the bad things that are done today by governments, by powerful corporations, by religions and other systems of belief can rarely be openly admitted, let alone justified. Today’s denialists are the wretched descendants of the proud propagandists of the past. 

 

This gap causes hypocrisy, naturally. The gap between what we humans want to believe we are and what we actually are. 

 

A gap has opened up between private desires and the public language of values…Almost anything is privately thinkable, but many things are publicly unspeakable. 

 

Of course, there is nothing new about a gap between public values and private desires. The very existence of a ‘public sphere’ presupposes a realm of civil virtue that is greater than the private realm of the individual. In fact, the very existence of publicly shared notions of ‘the good’ implies that not everyone can live up to it all the time. Only in a society without any kind of collective organization and norms would it be possible for there to be no conflict between public and private. 

 

The author later talks about how denialism doesn’t always mean a true desire to do evil (although in some cases it does), but more a desire to avoid the consequences of pursuing desires. 

 

How, then, does one square the not-always-unspeakable outcomes that denialists desire with my argument that denialism is driven by the gap between what people desire and what is speakable? My answer is that it is the consequences of pursuing these desires that is unspeakable. A successful fight for inaction on global warming as part of a desire to preserve untrammelled carbon-based free market capitalism will inevitably cause the suffering of millions, if not billions…Denialism allows these visions to be pursued as if they were cost-free. Desire is preserved from the reality of its consequences.

 

As he points out, even genocide denialism is a desire to avoid consequences. 

 

Even genocide denialism is driven by a similar fear of consequences. The Holocaust and other genocides inevitably involved dirty work - bodies that needed to be herded, killed, and disposed of - that only appeals to a small minority of even the most ideologically driven genocidaires. Denialism preserves genocide as a beautiful, spotless dream; as the cost-free removal of a hated class of persons from the world.

 

This is what Trump promises, by the way. A cost-free ethnic cleansing, a sanitary way to make America white again that we don’t have to actually watch, or even acknowledge. 

 

There is another line that I think is truly profound, and particularly reflects my parents’ embrace of denialism. 

 

The personal reasons behind the desires that leads to denialism may be various, but what denialists do share is the common, collective effort to reshape the world as they would like it to appear. For that reason, the specter haunting denialism is the disappointing, maybe even embarrassing, reality that we cannot mold the world as easily as we would like. 

 

Unsurprisingly, this leads denialists to increasing doses of cognitive dissonance. Which is, alas, as likely to be resolved by selective denial of reality as by positive change. Again, something I see in my parents, who have decided to blame me for the consequences of their actions in rejecting my wife and children. 

 

Like the author, I do genuinely feel for denialists - it is a terrible way to live. 

 

My quasi-religious, quasi-medical (and fully patronizing) use of the word ‘saving’ is deliberate, not because I consider denialists to be somehow fallen and corrupted, but because denialism is shot through with desperation and anxiety that shows it to be a kind of predicament; a burden, for all the bluster and defiance. 

 

The book gets particularly dark, though, when it looks at the alternative to denialism for the denialist. And that is something we are seeing increasingly in what the author calls our “post-denialism” future and present. And that is openly stating those dark desires. 

 

And that really is what Trump has done: made evil great again. A man like my father can now openly praise ethnic cleansing: “I don’t like Trump’s style, but at least he is finally doing something about the Hispanic problem…” Bigots can openly admit to wanting to murder LGBTQ people. Neo-Nazi groups can openly post racist fliers in my neighborhood. 

 

One unexpected thing in this chapter was the source of many of the quotes - those that do in fact state the desires openly. On the issue of global warming, the most pernicious came either directly from Murray Rothbard and Ludwig von Mises, or from the organizations dedicated to their ideas. 

 

Never heard of them? I haven’t talked about them much on the blog, but they are essentially the godfathers of the modern Social Darwinist movement in economics, the ideas that Ayn Rand eventually put in her poorly-written novels. And they boil down to the idea that it is morally wrong to use government to restrain the rich and powerful, who should be allowed to exploit, pillage, and even murder as they see fit. Because evolution or something. Unsurprisingly, these are the people willing to say that it is morally appropriate to destroy the planet no matter what the suffering for others, as long as we can get rich doing it. Saying the unspeakable out loud. 

 

And this leads to the problem many of us have in our new post-denialist age:

 

Can we handle a world of radical moral diversity? Can we live with other human beings when the profound differences that divide us are out in the open? What would it be like to live next door to someone who can openly proclaim his wish for millions of people to die? 

 

And later:

 

This possibility means that there is now no avoiding a reckoning with the discomfiting issues that those who fight denialism prefer to avoid: how do we respond to people who have radically different desires and morals to our own? How do we respond to people who delight in or are indifferent to genocide, to the suffering of millions, to venality and greed? We cannot assume that if people ‘knew the truth’ they would be like us. Denialism has hidden this moral diversity from us, but increasingly there is no hiding place. 

 

And therein lies the problem for me. A deeply distressing realization over the last decade or so has been that most of the people I grew up with, most of those I went to church with, most of those in my neighborhood, do not in fact share my core moral values. And that unfortunately includes my parents. Both on the grand scale of “those people” and whether they have value, but even on the question of whether I matter to them. The answer, by the way, is “definitely not.” They threw me away as soon as I challenged their ideology and politics. And, unfortunately, looking back, I think that my mother has never actually wanted the best for me. Rather, she wanted me to suffer in recompense for how the other firstborn males in her life made her suffer, and as proof that she was right all along. That’s an unspeakable truth, but it is no longer tenable to believe the opposite. 

 

For the author, what limited hope there is is contained in the idea that at least some people, once the mask of denialism comes off, will back away from the abyss. Whether this happens or not remains to be seen - I’m deeply skeptical myself, having found that even family relationships were not enough to change people. But maybe once the consequences become apparent, some will change their mind? We will see. 

 

In any case, this book does at least help one understand the dynamics of denialism, and the dark disease of the soul it conceals. Kahn-Harris makes his case well, and even though it is uncomfortable to consider that he may be right, I think it is something many of us will have to confront in the coming days. Whether we like it or not, many of the people we live among are not merely indifferent to the suffering of others, but actively seek to create it. That’s who we are as a species, unfortunately. 

 

For those of us who seek to transcend those tendencies toward violence and hate, we have a lot of work ahead of us, and we will need to stick together to protect the targets of that violence to the degree we can. At least now the mask is off. 

 

I have no answer for exactly how we handle living among people with profound moral differences. I can say that for myself, I cannot ever be close friends with them. That’s a bridge too far for me. In a weird sort of way, I feel like I understand better what it must have been like being an early Christian, weirdly devoted to the idea of loving your neighbor in a world where that was considered laughable. It’s just a shame that the people using Christ’s name are overwhelmingly on the opposite side than that of the early Christians.